Three-factor model of employee passion: An empirical study in the Indian context

Abstract

Although the passion that people demonstrate at work would appear to be a topic of considerable interest and importance to organizational scholars and practitioners, the extant literature scarcely discusses the construct of it without further investigation. The study of Vallerand et al. (2003) pertaining to the area of passion has made profound theoretical contribution confirming the precepts of positive psychology (Seligman, 2002). However, the behavioural outcomes such as working on holidays, or out-of-work outcomes such as constantly thinking about work when not at work (work rumination) sharing a nomological network with the construct, has not been examined by them, as argued by Perrewé et al., (2014). Further, the comprehensive work shown by Zigarmi et al. (2011) in defining the Work Passion (WP) construct suffers from methodological lacunae. Given that the extant literature on work passion calls for further examination, the pertinent study aims to investigate the validity and reliability of Passion scales based on the model proposed by Zigarmi et al. (2011). Four dimensions of a process model constituting work cognition, work affect, job wellbeing, and work intention along with work rumination as an integral part of work passion were examined. Questionnaires were administered to a sample of corporate professionals heralding spectrum of industries to validate the passion scale. The principal component analysis was performed which extracted four factors (work cognition, work affect, job well-being & work rumination) out of five factors to validate the construct. However, in order to confirm the validity of the scale, the structural equation modeling analysis was adopted which further indicated that the three-factor structure of work passion (work cognition, work affect, and work rumination) was the best fit model in comparison to the four-factor models. Incidentally, the emergence of work rumination as an important dimension of WP construct has confirmed the dualistic nature of the passion construct as stated by Vallerand et al. (2003) through its dualistic status as positive and negative work rumination. The triadic nature of WP can be prospective as well as retrospective in nature; where people tend to think about issues that have occurred in the past or anticipatively ruminate about issues and demands that may arise at work (Cropley & Zijlstra, 2011). The intriguing nature of the present study suggesting cognitions (work cognition), affects (work affects), and behaviours (work rumination) to be preceding the formation of dualistic status of passion (harmonious and obsessive passion) provides a good basis for future investigation.